US Supreme Court

 This is Joseph

The US Supreme Court has been a source of odd thinking, lately 

Josh Marshall has a post about how a reader suspects that John Roberts might decide to retire from the supreme court in order to preserve institutional legitimacy. I think this shows just how deranged the thinking about the supreme court has come. Is there anything that makes people think that judges voluntarily give up power?  

He is 65, way younger than Sandra Day O'Connor (around 78) or Anthony Kennedy (around 82). It just makes no sense that he'd give up influence on the court and the ability to advocate for legitimacy unless there was an external reason. 

Similarly, there is an odd sense of ownership of Supreme Court seats. People seem to think we should honor Ruth Bader Ginsberg's wish that her seat not be filled until after the election. There are a ton of very good reasons to not fill the seat quickly: recent past precedent (Scalia's replacement), lack of time to do a thorough vetting, and an ongoing pandemic creating the need for focusing on helping economic and medical victims all come immediately to mind. The idea that the seat is a feudal inheritance that the current occupant has any control over how it is filled in the future is not a good thing for the health of the republic.

Finally, the fact that covering pre-existing conditions is coming back up to the court, one more time, suggests that judicial rulings are becoming deeply unserious. The US has an insurance system that is based on churn as people change jobs many times over their careers, often without a whole lot of choice. Prices are opaque and systematically higher for people without insurance (the system is not set up for negotiation). Covering pre-existing conditions is simply a prerequisite for having the system function at all. That a seat flipping could credibly threaten this act, twelve years after it passed and after repeated judicial review, is . . . well, hard to credit is the nice way to say this.

Another easy litmus test. As a Canadian, I cannot name a single Supreme Court justice. I kind of remember the chief justice if I really think about it. I can name every single US justice, and give a quick summary of their politics. I worry that the politicization of the court will end in tears. 

Another sign of the process being broken is noted here. 

Amy Barrett is a former law professor and sitting judge. She does not have any idea about whether Medicare and social security are constitutional? Not hedging and saying that she is unaware of any grounds on which they could be. What is the point of the hearing if the justice is completely ignorant (or pretends to be ignorant) on law and policy? Not even to comment on the grounds on which these laws are currently based? What did she teach students? There are laws and nobody can tell if they are compatible with the constitution nor have I read any precedent? 

From Dennis the Menace to Vlad the Impaler

You might call this the flip-side of our Trash, Art and the Comics post. There we talked about  gaining insights into a period through its pop culture. Today's post is about how modern audiences often miss the point older works because they don't catch the obvious.

Though largely lost on today's readers, for those picking up the book in the 1890s, the contrast between Dracula's Transylvania and modern day London was obvious and explicit.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) October 12, 2020

In the the 1890s, people quite rightly thought of themselves as living at the height of a period of unprecedented scientific and technological breakthroughs. (I'd argue still unprecedented, but that's a topic for another post.) The characters in Dracula are well aware of the incongruity of a vampire roaming a contemporary metropolis. They discuss it at length through the book. Their leader, Dr. Van Helsing, explicitly frames the conflict as modern science versus an ancient supernatural force. 

Needless to say, most of this subtext never makes it to the adaptations, but even for readers of the original, I suspect most are likely to miss the point because we tend to underestimate grossly the period's sophisticated awareness of how science and technology was changing their world.

Tuesday Tweets -- if you held a gun to Werner Herzog's head...

Watch the whole thing.

In which Werner Herzog gives the an incredible answer when asked how many languages he speaks pic.twitter.com/BOdUwiImi8

— Séamas It Ever Was (@shockproofbeats) October 7, 2020

 Not really up on total factor productivity (assuming that's what they're talking about) but this can't be right.

Really mixed feelings about a metric that's supposed to be driven by technological innovation that peaks in the late thirties rather than the post-war era.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) October 6, 2020

Cool.

Meet the scutoid, a geometrical shape new to math, but not to nature — is the form that a group of cells in the body takes in order to pack tightly and efficiently into the tricky curves of organs https://t.co/K17sVjlGi2 pic.twitter.com/rbatgVLdvP

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) October 7, 2020

Even cooler.

Actually half the writing team, but it still counts.

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) October 9, 2020

Newman!

Ahead of #WorldPostDay, we have a very important message from your friendly local mail carrier. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/hUIsqzXJc5

— PACRONYM (@PACRONYM) October 8, 2020

And finally

That debate was the worst thing I've ever seen & I was in The Star Wars Holiday Special.

— Mark Hamill (@HamillHimself) September 30, 2020

The alternative theory is that they're making a big play for those three DC electoral votes

One of the many dirty little secrets of the major studios is that a nontrivial share of the advertising budget goes not to actually promoting a movie or series but to keeping a star happy. (Yeah, I split that infinitive. Want to make something of it?) It is not unheard of for all of a show’s outdoor marketing spend to go billboards placed where the star will see them.

We are seeing something analogous in the presidential campaign.

There must be a stronger English word than "pathetic" to describe this. https://t.co/2pd8UmdPZQ

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) October 9, 2020

To get a sense of how seemingly crazy this would seem to be you have to consider where the Trump campaign is being forced to cut back.

From the LA Times.

Trump’s retreat from Ohio, Iowa and New Hampshire reflects his struggle to change the dynamics of a race that polls suggest he is on track to lose. In the six weeks since his party’s national convention, Trump’s campaign has yanked more than $17 million in ads he’d previously booked in those states.

Two of them, Ohio and Iowa, are must-wins for the Republican president. Polls show him running almost dead even with the former vice president in both. Trump’s withdrawal of advertising in those states — despite the risk — is a sign of his campaign’s poor financial condition.

“It seems the Trump campaign has reached the point where they have to do some triage,” said Travis Ridout, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political ads. “They don’t seem to have enough money to run ads everywhere.”

I've suspected for years now that political analysts have underestimated how much of the GOP's messaging has been primarily focused on keeping Trump calm, particularly on the part of loyal soldiers like Graham. The strategy hasn't prevented erratic behavior from the president but it is reasonable to assume it has reduced it.

Now, though, the need for calm extends through the entire party. This is the point of the stag hunt where not only does a successful kill seem unlikely, but where the very possibility of making it back home safely is in question.

Trump and the Republicans are running these DC ads for the same reason that small children repeatedly tell themselves that there is nothing under the bed. The main difference here being that for the GOP this monster is quite real.

Trash, Art and the Comics

[If you haven't already, you owe it to yourself to read the original.]

If you're trying to get a feel for a historical period, not seek out profound insights into the times, but just get a sense of what things were like, you are often better off opting for what Kael would call the good trash rather than the first rate art of the period.

Great art is of a time but timeless. Its creators see further, deeper. They have a unique vision, The works connect with audiences in entirely different ways as the years pass. It would be a mistake to assume we see Lear in the same way groundlings did four hundred years ago, just as it would be a mistake to assume Shakespeare was a typical Elizabethan.

All of this is problematic when you just want a picture of an era. For that, you'll probably be better off going with something competent and popular in its time that has aged badly. John O'Hara instead of William Faulkner. Dennis the Menace instead of Peanuts.

Hank Ketcham seldom pushed boundaries but he and his assistants were solid cartoonists and sharp observers who, probably unintentionally and more in the background than the foreground, caught all sorts of interesting details.

The following panels are from 1960 and 1961.


Note the bench seat and the small child standing on it while his father drives. Unsafe at Any Speed was years away.

Though they were a ubiquitous part of American life for almost one hundred years, I wonder how many people reading this know what trading stamps were

























Even in the safest escapist entertain, 1961 was a scary time.

More on the great unwinding -- the post-Trump GOP is probably inevitable but still unimaginable

Just to reiterate a few points we've been hammering for a few years now.

1. Trump has become more and more toxic to a growing majority of the country. If things continue going the way they're headed, he will be the ultimate example of von Hoffman's rat on the kitchen floor for the Republican Party.

2. But unlike with Nixon,  the base is personally loyal to Trump, not to the GOP.

No flight to Berchtesgaden for this loyal man—he's staying in the bunker https://t.co/jlZf09aIlA

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) October 6, 2020

3. It is difficult to describe what we're seeing as anything other than a cult of personality, complete with the Soviet style propaganda images, the assumption of mental and physical perfection and the messianic overtones.

4. Even if the base were to continue to support the party, the Republicans absolutely must broaden its appeal. After 1988, they have won the popular vote for the presidency exactly once and that was the special case of a wartime reelection.

5. But the base will not tolerate disloyalty to either Trump or his message. Keeping them happy while broadening support is impossible, but the alternative is to find a way to go from a minority to a majority party while trying to make up for the loss of around half of your supporters. 

Are there scenarios where this does happen relatively quickly? Sure, but there are no obvious paths that don't require some deus ex machina plot twist. Which leads to the final and most important point.

6. With a handful of possible exceptions like the extraordinarily sharp Josh Marshall, observers are almost all underestimating the chances of profound and unexpected changes to the way American politics works. I'm not saying what's going to fall or which direction it will tip, but things are going to be different.

From Marshall

But don’t take your eyes off this broader calculus – one separate from Trump, his state of mind, one that is above all rational. Yes, everyone should give their 110%. Everybody get out to vote. The stakes for a second Trump term are too high to take anything for granted. But for those gaming out their own moves and post-January realities, Trump’s defeat is starting to look very likely. Under normal circumstances that would lead congressional Republicans to cut Trump loose and pitch their reelection as a check on the power of a Democratic President. That would be a great card to play for a number of endangered Republican Senators at the moment. But it’s all but impossible since loyalty to Trump is now the centerpiece of Republican identity. And any move away from him would trigger a fatal backlash.

A year ago today at the blog

There are a few things I'd change if I were writing this today. The big one is that, between the pandemic and mail-in ballots, Straussian ideas and tactics were about cause massive loss of life and threaten democracy.

The rest I'm comfortable letting stand.

Monday, October 7, 2019

Out with the Wages of Strauss, in with the Great Unwinding

We have reached a point in the show which always makes the fans a little nervous. we have decided that one of our oldest and biggest storylines is starting to come to a natural conclusion so we need to begin wrapping up the loose ends and introducing the next one.

For years now, when it came to politics, the big recurring story was what you might call the wages of Strauss. we pushed the we pushed the idea that either the main cause or the essential context of almost every major political development over the past couple of decades came from the conservative movements relatively public conclusion that their agenda, while it might hold its own for a while and perhaps even surge ahead now and then, was destined to lose the battle of public opinion in the long run.

This left them with two choices, either modify their ideas so that they could win over the majority of the public, or undermine the Democratic process through a Straussian model, an approach based on controlling most of the money and increasing the influence that could be bought with that money, changing government so that an ever smaller part of the population had an ever-larger role in governing the country and creating a sophisticated three-tiered information management system where trusted sources of information were underfunded and undermined, the mainstream press was kept in line through a combination of message discipline and incentives with special emphasis placed on working the refs, and the creation of a special media bubble for the base which used spin, propaganda, and outright disinformation to keep the canon fodder angry, frightened, and loyal.

For a long time this approach worked remarkably well, but you could argue that the signs of instability were there from the beginning, particularly the difficulty of controlling the creation and flow of disinformation, the vulnerability to what you might call hostile take over, and the way the system lent itself to cults of personality.

We've had a good run with this storyline for a long time now, but it seems to be coming to a resolution and it has definitely lost a great deal of its novelty. (Lots of people are making these points now.)

The next big story, but one which we believe will dominate American politics for at least the next decade or so will be how the Republican party deals with the unwinding of the Trump cult of personality. Dismantling such a cult is tremendously difficult under the best of circumstances where the leader can be eased out gently, but you have with Donald Trump someone who has no loyalty to the party whatsoever and who is temperamentally not only capable but inclined to tear the house down should he feel betrayed.

If Trump continues to grow more erratic and public disapproval and support for his removal continues to grow, then association will be increasingly damaging to Republicans in office. However, for those same politicians, at least those who come up for election in the next two to four years, it is not at all clear that any could survive if the Trump loyalists turned on them.

But this goes beyond individual candidates. Trump's hold on the core of the base is so strong and so personal that, if he were to tell them directly that the GOP had betrayed both him and them, they would almost certainly side with him. They might form a third party, or simply boycott if you elections, or, yes, even consider voting for Democrats.. I know that last one sounds unlikely but it is within the realm of possibility if the intraparty civil war got bitter enough.

Obviously, if Trump survives this scandal and is reelected in 2020, all of this is moot, but if not, then how things break will be a story we’ll be glad to have been following.

Tuesday tweets -- the great unwinding (plus a really cool snowball fight)

We have been arguing for a while now that the fate of the GOP probably depends on how well it can disentangle itself from a cult of personality that not has reached the level of Soviet era Stalin worship but has also embraced some the most delusional conspiracy theories on record. 

The past few days have brought these issues into high relief.

Immediately made me think of this. (“Sitting in the Kremlin, Stalin worries about each one of us.”) pic.twitter.com/k3P29NoyAV

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) October 5, 2020

QAnon signs starting to show up here outside Walter Reed pic.twitter.com/5e5zfzmVOx

— Josh Lederman (@JoshNBCNews) October 4, 2020

"The President is working with documents!" was the stock phrase Yeltsin's staff used whenever he was at his dacha in Barvikha unconscious from drinking or feeling the aftereffects of a binge.
It was such a commonly used, thinly veiled excuse, it became a running joke in Russia. https://t.co/mAWzazBDtm

— Slava Malamud (@SlavaMalamud) October 3, 2020

We are now at the point where what used to be a Chuck Norris joke is now used by Republicans to suck up to their Great Leader. pic.twitter.com/6WXVu4Fhy5

— J.P. de Ruiter (@JPdeRuiter) October 6, 2020

‘God-tier genetics’: A stunned MAGA world offers blame, adulation after Trump’s diagnosis https://t.co/2RBd9F1Kky via @politico

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) October 3, 2020

COVID stood NO chance against @realDonaldTrump! pic.twitter.com/GtNPOHkDqF

— Kelly Loeffler (@KLoeffler) October 5, 2020

It’s like house of saddam https://t.co/4YjOGp9vVa

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) October 6, 2020

2016, 2020 pic.twitter.com/xx6kL1Z72V

— Dave Weigel, Re-Animator (@daveweigel) October 2, 2020

Disturbing but importanthttps://t.co/bfpciXStLT

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) October 3, 2020

But rather than leave you with these ugly thoughts, here's something charming to close the post. 

Snowball fight in 1896.
Lyon, France. Louis Lumière. #DeOldify pic.twitter.com/dnoE4KHRKe

— Joaquim Campa (@JoaquimCampa) September 30, 2020

Two years ago today -- well, that worked out

I was working on a post about silly but persistent notions about Mars colonies but I realized I wouldn't have time to get it and everything else I had put off until Sunday done, so I decided to do "_____ years ago today" dodge.

Here's what popped up.

Friday, October 5, 2018

If you're tired of the Mars rants, just skip to the Rocket Man cover

This Neil Degrasse Tyson segment from the Tonight Show was amusing – – both he and Stephen Colbert are good at this sort of thing and play well off of each other – – but I'm including it because it hits on a point that I've alluded to in previous conversations of space exploration and the vanity aerospace industry.

Much, arguably most, of the 21st century discussion of man's expansion into and utilization of outer space is based on an implicit and often explicit colonial era framework. This includes such respectable news organizations as the New York Times, NPR, the BBC, and most recently and egregiously the Atlantic.

Any time you see the term "Mars colony," you know you are in trouble. Almost inevitably what follows will assume that the second half of the 21st century will basically just be a remake of the 17th and 18th, despite causes and conditions being all but completely non-analogous. I have neither the time nor the knowledge to go into detail here, but if you will forgive the oversimplification, the original system was based on habitable, arable lands which generally offered significant potential for trade and were easily accessed and conquered and which required a great deal of labor in order to pay off for the colonizing power.

None of this applies to Mars or any other body in the solar system. Outside of certain research questions, there are for the foreseeable future very few economically sound arguments for a human presence in space. Even if something like Martian mining proves viable, any work on the surface of the planet will be done largely, perhaps entirely, by autonomous and semiautonomous robots. This is true now and it will certainly be more true with the AI and robotics of 2050. Based on purely practical considerations, there will be no way to justify more than the most minimal of human presences on the red planet.

This leaves us with various romantic arguments about man's need to reach out to strange lands. [Insert super cut of inspirational Star Trek speeches here.] 100 or so years ago, you might have been able to make a reasonably convincing argument for the explore and settle model. Multiple high profile polar expeditions dominated the news while scientist were for the first time probing the depths of the ocean with dredges and other specialized instruments. The idea of cities in previously inhospitable or even impossible places captured the public imagination.

But this is not 1918. This is 2018 and, as Neil Degrasse Tyson points out, no one is lining up to colonize Antarctica, nor do we have undersea settlements or subterranean metropolises. Hell, we have trouble getting people to move to North Dakota.

Events have gotten ahead of me

Much to think about at the moment.

Maybe we should all lighten up -- more Thursday tweets

Be honest, couldn't you use some aliens, giant robots and Doobie on Murray action about now?

Turn it upside down and it's an alien reading Torah. You're welcome. pic.twitter.com/JbAcCY1etW

— Rabbi Yisroel Bernath (@montrealrabbi) September 21, 2020

Bill Murray receives a legal demand from the Doobie Brothers. And it’s everything you’d want it to be... pic.twitter.com/R1L99yZSBj

— Eriq Gardner (@eriqgardner) September 24, 2020

Mad respect for King George III's long game. https://t.co/oMw3T6jaHU

— Berny Belvedere (@bernybelvedere) September 25, 2020

My dad built a tensegrity office toy :) pic.twitter.com/pcy8YrFwqb

— Luis Batalha 🇵🇹🇺🇸 (@luismbat) September 27, 2020

Wow! Impressive, how did these go-getters find such success?

Oh, pic.twitter.com/qUQOXllnJt

— Eoin Higgins (@EoinHiggins_) September 27, 2020

Car kept jamming on the brakes thinking this was a person 🤦‍♂️ The NN was dreaming @greentheonly pic.twitter.com/ARQn23oXLl

— Electric Future (@electricfuture5) September 26, 2020

A giant robot resembling the 1970s anime figure Gundam has been tested in Yokohama, Japan. The robot stands at nearly 60 feet tall and weighs 24 tons. https://t.co/TXvXUPjucl pic.twitter.com/wd3Uv0mhaj

— CNN International (@cnni) September 26, 2020

More on omnicompetence

Spending so much time on the subject of how money influences entertainment and entertainment journalism got me to thinking about Pauline Kael's prescient 1980 essay on the changing business model of the film industry, "Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers."

This passage is a bit off topic for that thread, but it does fit nicely with another, what happens when successful assholes buy their way into an industry they know nothing about, convinced of their own omnicompetence. [Emphasis added.]

There are direct results when conglomerates take over movie companies. Heads of the conglomerates may be drawn into the movie business for the status implications—the opportunity to associate with the world-famous. Some other conglomerate heads  may  be  drawn  in  for  the  women,  too;  a  new  social  life  beckons,  and  as  they become  social,  people  with  great  names  approach  them  as  equals,  and  famous  stars and producers and writers and directors tell them they’ve heard from other studios and about ideas they have for movies. The conglomerate heads become indignant that the studios they run have passed on these wonderful projects. The next day, they’re on the phone raising hell with the studio bosses. Very soon, they’re likely to be directors and suggesting material to them, talking to actors, and company executives what projects should be developed. How bad is the judgment of the conglomerate heads? Very bad. They haven’t grown up in a show business milieu—they don’t have the instincts or the information of those who have lived and sweated movies for many years. (Neither do most of the current studio bosses.) The corporate heads may be business geniuses, but as far as movies are concerned, have virgin instincts; ideas that are new to them and take them by storm may have failed grotesquely dozens of times. But they feel that they are creative people—how else could they have made so much money and be in a position to advise artists what to do? Who is to tell them no? Within a very short time, they are in fact, though not in title, running the studio. They turn up compliant executives who will settle for the title and not fight for the authority or for their own tastes if, in fact, they have any. The conglomerate heads find these compliant executives among lawyers and agents, among television executives, and in the lower echelons of the companies they’ve taken over. Generally, these executives reserve all their enthusiasm for movies that have made money; those are the only movies they like. When a director or a writer talks to them and tries to suggest the kind of movie he has in mind by using a comparison, they may stare at him blankly. They are usually law school or business school graduates; they have no frame of reference. Worse, they have no shame about not knowing anything about movies. From their point of view, such knowledge is not essential to their work.Their talent is being able to anticipate their superiors’ opinions; in meetings, they show a sixth sense for guessing what the most powerful person wants to hear. And if they ever guess wrong, they know how to shift gears without a tremor. So the movie companies wind up with top production executives whose interest in movies rarely extends beyond the selling possibilities; they could be selling neckties just as well as movies, except that they are drawn to glamour and power.

Revisiting a post from 2017

New this morning - Senate Majority PAC is spending $$ in South Carolina for the first time, launching a $6.5 million campaign against @LindseyGrahamSC in a sign that Dems see this race as winnable https://t.co/qgkBqGo7bf

— Seung Min Kim (@seungminkim) September 28, 2020

Thursday, March 2, 2017

There will be safe seats. There are no safe seats.

In 2017, we have a perfect example of when not to use static thinking and naïve extrapolation.

Not only are things changing rapidly, but, more importantly, there are a large number of entirely plausible scenarios that would radically reshape the political landscape and would undoubtedly interact in unpredictable ways. This is not "what if the ax falls?" speculation; if anything, have gotten to the point where the probability of at least one of these cataclysmic shifts happening is greater than the probability of none. And while we can't productively speculate on exactly how things will play out, we can say that the risks fall disproportionately on the Republicans.

Somewhat paradoxically, chaos and uncertainty can make certain strategic decisions easier. Under more normal (i.e. stable) circumstances it makes sense to expend little or no resources on unwinnable fights (or, conversely,  to spend considerable time and effort deciding what's winnable). The very concept of "unwinnable," however, is based on a whole string of assumptions, many of which we cannot make under the present conditions.

The optimal strategy under the circumstances for the Democrats is to field viable candidates for, if possible, every major 2018 race. This is based on the assumption not that every seat is winnable, but that no one can, at this point, say with a high level of confidence what the winnable seats are.

I have to admit, it’s kind of a pleasant change to be making fun of trivial things again…

And you don’t get much more trivial than the Emmys.

First off, any show with Eugene Levy or Catherine O’Hara is doing god’s work and having the two work together is going above and beyond. I haven’t gotten around to Schitt’s Creek yet, but I have no doubt it’s a deserving show which certainly makes this a feel good ending:

In 2020, the sixth and final season was nominated for 15 Primetime Emmy Awards. This broke the record for the most Emmy nominations given to a comedy in its final season. During the 2020 Emmys, the show became the first-ever comedy or drama series to sweep the four acting categories (Outstanding Lead Actor, Outstanding Lead Actress, Outstanding Supporting Actor, Outstanding Supporting Actress) and one of only four live action shows, along with All in the Family, The Golden Girls, and Will & Grace where all the principal actors have won at least one Emmy Award.

If anything, this understates how unprecedented the sweep is. If you look at the other shows mentioned here (All in the Family, The Golden Girls, and Will & Grace), you’ll see that they had Emmy wins or nominations every year they ran. Schitt’s Creek had never won a single statue before this year. Until 2019 (note that date), it hadn’t even gotten a nomination. The Television Academy is notorious for playing favorites. To go from nonentity to “honor just to be nominated” to powerhouse in two years goes against the industry’s laws of nature.

The sudden rise in popularity is often credited to a “Netflix bump” from when the streaming service picked it up in January of 2017 (another date to note). Left out of almost all reporting on these bumps is the role of marketing and PR. Netflix spends billions a year on promotion and while it prioritizes its “originals” (which brings up other interesting points), it still has enough for some fairly generous “Now on Netflix” campaigns.

That said, shows getting a ratings boost from syndication has been a recognized and well-documented phenomenon since the business model was established in the seventies. There’s no question that Schitt’s Creek got a bump, but just how big was it? Though not perfect, Google trends can provide a pretty good picture of the interest in a show.

Post-Netflix numbers were certainly better but after settling down, they remained relatively flat for well over a year then, around the fourth quarter of 2018, at which point they started a remarkable climb. On a related note…

In [May] 2018, Debmar-Mercury, a division of Lionsgate, acquired the U.S. syndication rights to Schitt's Creek. The series is scheduled to debut in syndication on Fox Television Stations throughout the U.S. during the Fall 2020 television season. The series is also began airing reruns of series on Comedy Central on October 2, 2020.

Despite its low cool factor, television syndication remains a tremendously lucrative business. For a fairly obscure cable/Canadian show like Schitt’s Creek, awards and media buzz can greatly increase marketability. It would be shocking if Lionsgate, a company with billions in revenue and a substantial PR budget, didn’t launch a major campaign and, given the Q2 acquisition and time to plan the campaign, we’d expect the money to start flowing in October, 2018.

In 2020, this PR push was followed by an aggressive Emmy campaign.

I don’t want to get carried away – this is just one metric (a noisy one at that) and some anecdotes – but the standard narrative (check this Vanity Fair piece for an example that adheres strictly to the form) doesn’t really fit we we see here, neither with the Netflix bump nor with finding an audience. Instead, we have another example of how PR departments shape things like awards and media coverage, and unfortunately not just on trivial matters.

Mono-causal explanations

This is Joseph

One thing that drives me a little nuts is how people want to have things happen due to a single cause. In most of life, things are never so simple. Mark noted this in a previous post. Many things can contribute to an event occuring, in a combination of necessary and sufficient causes.

The triggering event for this was a tweet on oral anti-diabetic medications suggesting that diet and lifestyle should be tried. I think that everyone prescribing medications would prefer that lifestyle changes would be wonderful. But the real world is complicated. For example, if it is Type 1 diabetes there are no lifestyle changes that will help -- before the development of insulin this was a certain death sentence.  Even for Type 2 diabetes, where the medications are most likely, it will not always be the case that lifestyle is sufficient to cause remission. Instead a combination of lifestyle and medications, together, are likely to be more effective than either alone. 

But this concept applies to all sorts of other conditions. For example, when a person leaves a job there are almost always a series of causes. Some of it could be salary whereas location or family could matter more for others. As a result you can never infer anything about a workplace from a couple of people leaving, but a string of attrition looks like a bad sign. 

As Mark noted, this also comes into play with all sorts of political systems. People like single explanations for why a specific person wins a race. The truth is that there is probably a wide range of motivations for specific votes -- ranging from random chance to fierce interest in a specific policy. 

But more important, we should discipline ourselves not to conflate risk factors with causes. Obesity might increase the risk of a deep vein thrombosis, but many non-obese people have these events. The counter-factual person (same person just not obese) might well have had one regardless of obesity. 

Looking for a simple explanation always suggests you are missing important information.